


Fluffy Blackberry Pancakes

by JacarandaBanyan



Series: Tony Stark Bingo [8]
Category: Marvel, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Genre: Cooking, Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Pancakes, Pie, Prompt Fill, Tony Stark Bingo 2018, Tooth-Rotting Fluff, blackberry pancakes, it's really just a barebones structure from which to hang the fluff, the plot is barely there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-04
Updated: 2018-11-04
Packaged: 2019-08-17 09:58:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,886
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16514156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JacarandaBanyan/pseuds/JacarandaBanyan
Summary: Bucky shows up in the lab scratched up and sporting red-stained teeth. This leads directly to pie baking and pancake making.





	Fluffy Blackberry Pancakes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [rebelmeg](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rebelmeg/gifts), [roseandthorns28](https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseandthorns28/gifts), [Cinnamon_Anemone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cinnamon_Anemone/gifts).



> For Tony Stark Bingo. Prompt: Smell
> 
> Thank you to Roe for betaing and to Rebelmeg and Cinna for cheering me on when I was having trouble writing this (I just wanted the fluff but the fluff gods refused to make it easy for me!).

Tony was pulled from his engineering binge when Bucky walked into the lab covered in scratches and carrying several large tupperware containers filled with something dark and wet. Some of the scratches were bleeding, while some were only thin pink lines on his skin. They were especially concentrated on his hands and face, though his clothes were also ripped in several places. 

He saved his progress with a wave of his hand and sprang to his feet.

“Bucky! What happened? You’re bleeding.”

He instinctively called the gauntlet to him. Whatever could make his boyfriend bleed was certainly tough enough to do much worse to a fragile baseline human like him.

“Come on upstairs with me.” Bucky said.

Tony’s heart raced. What was upstairs? Were they being attacked? Who by? What were they after?

“I’m going to show you how to make purple pancakes.” Bucky continued. He smiled wide as he said it, baring red-stained teeth. A little chunk the size of a bread tiny breadcrumb was caught between his two front teeth. 

Tony’s thought process screeched to a halt. The gauntlet continued to piece itself together around his extended hand.

“What?”

“You’ve been cooped up down here for days. Come on up to the kitchen, I’ve already got everything ready to go.” He turned to leave, and Tony jerked out of his battle stance to run after him.

“Look, I’m sure your pancakes are good, but I care much less about the color than I do about the fact that you are bleeding. Did you go through a windshield or something? Should I be calling Bruce?”

Bucky just shrugged and stepped into the elevator. “I got into a bit of a fight with the bushes, it’s no big deal. It’ll fix itself on its own.” He nodded at the scratches on his arms, the lightest of which had already disappeared. Tony darted into the elevator after him and crowded him up against the corner so he could get a better look.

“What exactly do you mean by ‘a bit of a fight with the bushes?’ Is there a terrorist hiding in my non-existent shrubbery? We’re in the middle of New York City, buddy, there really aren’t that many bushes for you to even get into a fight with. And plants don’t bleed, so why does your mouth look like a cheap vampire costume piece?”

“Not here. I went outside the city to get these.” He hefted one of the tupperware containers, careful not to jostle the ones balanced on and under his other arm. “There’s no fight, doll, relax.”

“And what, exactly,  _ are _ those?”

“Blackberries. Lots of them.” He smiled at Tony again, and upon closer inspection he realized that his teeth were not red with the blood of his enemies, because the color was a little too purple for blood. The little chunk was a small, round section of a blackberry.

“Oh.”

The adrenaline in his system hadn’t worn out yet, and it crashed uneasily against his relief. The danger was gone, but there had never been any danger to begin with.

“So, why did you fight a blackberry bush instead of just asking Jarvis to buy them for you? How far away did you have to go to get these, anyway? I hope you took a car or something and didn’t run there and back. I know sweat stings like lemon juice over cuts like those, even small ones, so if you did I don’t want to hear about it. You’ll try and make it sound like you were being reasonable, which is patently untrue.”

Bucky just smiled. “Don’t worry about it. It’ll heal soon enough.”

Tony shook his head. “Uh-uh. Not under my roof. If you’re dumb enough to come back looking like you fought every stray cat in the city, you’re going to sit on the counter and let me smother you in bandaids.”

* * *

“So, what are we doing with all these berries?” Tony asked.

“I'm going to show you how to make purple pancakes.” Bucky repeated. He held up one of the tupperware containers with his metal arm. His other arm, which was resting on the small of Tony’s back, was so covered in children’s extra-large Iron Man bandaids that not a single square inch of flesh could be seen. They had turned a dark reddish-blackish-purplish color where they'd come in contact with the blackberries, making it look like he really did have some sort of grievous wound.

Tony was still skeptical. “Sounds to me like the corruption of a perfectly good breakfast food. I'm not interested in moldy pancakes. Try Bruce, he likes the squishy sciences. He'll appreciate your purple mold.”

Bucky rolled his eyes. “I promise, it's not mold.”

He must have seen that Tony wasn’t convinced as he kept talking. 

“And it’s not biology, it’s chemistry. You like chemistry. Ergo, you’ll like this.”

“Using science to shanghai me into helping you with your cooking project? I like it. So, how many pancakes were you thinking of making, exactly? Steve’s record is still under a hundred, you know, and I can’t eat more than a normal person amount.”

Bucky smiled his red-toothed smile again. 

“They’re not all for pancakes. While you make pancakes, I’m going to make a pie.”

“I thought you said you were going to teach me how to make purple pancakes?”

“I will, doll, I will. I’ll just be making pie at the same time. Besides, it’s not that hard. You’ll catch on quick.”

He set the berries down, then directed Tony to get out various bowls and ladles. 

“It’s just like making regular pancakes, but with an extra step. You do know how to make pancakes, right?”

Tony smiled. “Of course I know how to make pancakes! I have JARVIS buy the stuff to make them, then I ask him where the pans are, and then I tell him that I should make a robot that makes pancakes, and then I go down to my lab to make a pancake robot, then I get distracted, and when I come up for air Jarvis has ordered me pancakes from a professional.”

His boyfriend laughed. “Okay, smartass. So you should have pancake mix. Go get it. You’re a scientist, I’m sure you can measure stuff.”

Tony gasped in faux indignation, and Bucky silenced whatever he was going to say by pressing a blackberry to his lips. It left a dark stain on them, like he'd tried to apply dark lipstick but hadn't quite done it right.

* * *

They stayed in the kitchen for hours.

The pancake batter really did turn a soft lavender purple when you mixed the berries into it, which wasn’t what Tony would have expected. The juice was so dark and reddish, he’d have thought mixing them in would have created a bloody-looking mixture. 

They turned a little less purple and more the mixed purple-brown of dungeness crabs once they were done in the pan, but that was okay. The blackberry taste held on better than the color, but wasn’t overpowering.

Even better was the smell. Tony was already quite fond of the smell of pancakes, but adding the blackberries somehow made it even better. It wafted from the pan in heavenly tendrils until it had filled the entire kitchen. 

“These are so much better than regular pancakes,” he said to Bucky through a mouthful of fluffy blackberry-sugary-goodness. “I want to eat this for breakfast every day for the rest of the year, and I want this specific smell to greet me every morning. Hey, JARVIS, how feasible would it be to bottle this smell and sell it?”

"I believe perfume making and scent production is actually quite a complicated field, Sir. You would have to go to a great deal of trouble for what would likely be an inferior reproduction."

"Dang it."

Bucky just smiled at him and continued working on the blackberry pie he’d promised would be better than anything frozen and microwavable. “Nah, that would mean you’d have to actually get up and be present at breakfast. I’ll just have to remind you of all the good breakfast food you missed once you do show up.”

Tony held his hand to his heart. “Traitor! How could my own boyfriend do such a thing?”

“Don’t talk with your mouth full honey, you look like a chipmunk.”

"I'm serious, the smell alone might be enough to wake me from the deepest slumber."

"You say that like you've slept deeply since I've met you."

"The point remains!" Tony wagged a finger at Bucky, but didn't leave his spot by the stove. He was too besotted by the smell to leave.

Tony reached his pancake threshold long before the berries ran out, and his boyfriend only needed so many berries for a pie, so he ended up feeding him the surplus. After each fresh batch, he would cut them up and hold them up to Bucky’s lips with a fork while he worked on the pie crust. Every once in a while he’d help with the pie-making, but mostly he kept the purple pancakes coming.

Running the pie berries under the tap to clean them did something to them so that even if they weren’t quite ripe, or sported hidden spots of harder, sour red that the picker hadn’t noticed, they were just as juicy as if they’d been so ripe they were just about ready to tumble off the vine under gravity’s gentle touch. Just touching them turned the pads of his fingers dark pink, nearly edging into the darker purple color of the unwatered-down juice. 

Little droplets of the dark juice splashed onto Tony’s cheek when his boyfriend upended the bag into the mixing bowl. He wiped then off with his fingertips, then dramatically offered them to Bucky, who kissed them with equal theatrics. The juice smeared over their faces, leaving reddish smears. Some of it got on their clothes as well, but what was a blackberry stain among a collage of oil stains, anyway?

Tony demanded Bucky let him eat the raw dough that was left over after finishing the crust, and after a playful argument he did. After that, they stuck the pie in the oven and started cleaning up the kitchen, which consisted of about fifty percent cleaning and fifty percent wiping flour on each other’s faces. 

The bandaids on Bucky’s arms were soaked in blackberry juice before they even got started, so he ended up leaving red handprints all over the counters before they realized that they were simply adding to the mess. To Tony’s horror, Bucky started ripping the bandaids off. Bucky had to explain over his yelling that the juice had already loosened them. Tony still insisted in running them under water to make sure they weren't still stuck on hard. 

They nearly burned their tongues on the pie when it was done, but it was delicious, so it didn’t really matter. They had delicious food, a delicious smell, and a delicious partner to share it with. 

(When Steve got home, though, he almost threw his shield at them, thinking they were in the middle of a battle. To be fair, the kitchen did kinda look like a crime scene, what with all the red handprints they'd only halfheartedly cleaned up, and they were covered in red stains.)


End file.
